Gender and culture Module 1

Framing
question: What is the specific relationship between these concepts,
gender and culture, and why is it relevant to the history of women and
of women’s movements in India?

The module will deal with the following ideas:

- How ideas on men and women get fixed and become part of
patriarchal structures of oppression

- How feminism has pointed to a nature-culture opposition;
and women in the non-west are relegated to the domain of culture (unlike in the
west)

- The emergence of the ‘culture question’ in India and
feminist approaches to national identity

- How formations of the notion of culture in the Indian
context are premised on woman

Sections:

1. The Problem
of Gender

When we think of “men” or “women”, we tend to assume that
the reference is to biological beings who are “naturally” inclined to behave in
certain ways. Popular culture is full of images of typical behaviour patterns
of those who come from either Mars or Venus. Television soaps, popular films,
stories and cartoons in weekly magazines all tell stories filled with tragedy
and comedy, pathos and humour. These emotions often derive from fixed ideas of
male and female attitude, activity and appearance.

The ideas tend to get fixed and re-fixed through various
cultural forms, and circulated in a range of media. Cultural forms include all
kinds of texts and practices that contribute to and change the ways in which we
identify with a certain identity (for eg Indian). For instance, the idea that
women are nurturing and men are aggressive is a cultural idea, not a natural
one. It is an idea that gets naturalised and we assume that women arelike
that, when it is actually a notion that is born out of a certain fixed way
of understanding men and women (perhaps through educational texts, media
representations, scientific research that claims it as fact, or religious
views). The key problems with these fixed ideas are that (a) they give little
scope for understanding change in how real men and women live, and (b) they
tend to create a hierarchy, placing women in an inferior position. The
consequences are serious, and have led to the operation of what has been called
patriarchal [explain this term] structures of oppression.

Activity:

List some stereotypes about men and women that you are
familiar with, whether in films, or in opinions that circulate around you. It
would be useful to list views on activity, appearance and attitude. Discuss
these in relation to whether or not you think they are ‘true’, and where these
stereotypes generally circulate (where they are promoted, what groups they are
attached to, how they are linked to politics).

Both men and women over the centuries have tried in
different ways and in different societies to question some of these stereotypes
[explain this term] Early critical writing about this problem can be seen in
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Structures on
Political and Moral Subjects (1792) [citation] which was written after the
French Revolution. Wollstonecraft argued that the declaration of human rights
sweeping across the world at that time did not include half the human race
because it focussed only on the rights of “man”. She also criticised women for
succumbing to fixed ideas of femininity and wasting their time in reading
romantic novels instead of becoming aware of their true potential.

2. The
Nature-Culture binary

Other critical writers talked about how Western civilization
was seen as being born out of the activity of great men, and how the struggle
of the civilizers was always against the women who kept pulling them back to a
state of nature. The wilderness being tamed by the men was a metaphor for the
female nature that had to be conquered. Feminist [feminist: speaks from the
perspective of one who is interested in dismantling the ideas and institutions
that are based on the subjugation of women] scholars in the West suggested that
nature and culture formed a binary [explain term]. “[In western feminist
history] the most common pair of terms to be evoked and fought over are nature
and culture.” [Mary John, “Feminism in India and the West”, Cultural
Dynamics 10 (2), 197-209]. By analyzing the nature-culture binary, western
feminists produced important critiques of organization of knowledge as well as
institutions like family. However, in non-Western societies, women were
historically seen as part of Culture.

Feminist approaches to national identity: Feminist historical scholarship in India has been able to show that the formulation
of notions of culture in India
were crucially related to women. This draws our attention to the significance
of the culture question under colonial rule. With culture understood here as a
mark of distinctiveness and distinction in relation to the colonizing West, we
also gain insights into how a historically specific way of thinking about
Indian women came to be naturalised or made obvious.

The discussions about culture in gender theory in India are based
on critiques of the nationalist project in both pre- and post-Independence
phases. Feminists have looked at the time of the anti-colonial struggles and
how a self-constructed Indian identity was born in opposition to the view the
colonisers had of the natives. They have also gone on to theorise the
post-independence time, when it was important to decide how India would imagine
itself, as an independent nation that was no longer subject to British rule.
This imagination of India
gave rise to a range of representations within various fields. In a range of
writings spanning a variety of disciplinary locations (history, sociology,
literary studies, art history, film studies) feminist scholars have engaged
with and analysed the formation of normative femininity [explain term]
as it takes shape in the context of discussions about Indianness. Approaching
the problem from a different direction, some writers have looked at the
formation of the normative citizen-subject [explain term] in India, arguing
that it is informed by debates on the woman question as well as by new embodiments
of masculinity and femininity. This has been a way of understanding and
critiquing political forms from the standpoint of gender, saying that the
citizen is not a neutral category in the way in which it functions. Certain
bodies do not ‘fit’ the idea of the citizen (in how they are ‘wrongly’
masculine or feminine); and the idea of the citizen rests on specific ways in
which women are positioned. CROSS-REFERENCE WITH MASCULINITY-FEMININITY MODULE.

3. Emergence of the
culture question:

How are ‘we’ different from ‘them’? This question is posed
in the third world or more broadly non-Western societies as part of a colonial
contestation. By this we mean a contest between colonizer and colonized on the
relative merits of their cultures. With the onslaught of the colonizing West in
India
in the late 18th to early 19th century, some of the
colonized Indians responded by asserting the superiority of their own culture.
If we look at how the term for “culture” emerged in modern Indian languages, we
notice that the most commonly used term, sanskriti, is actually a translation of the English
word “culture”.

The point being made here is not that there was no concept
of culture before the English introduced it, but that after the 19th
century we invest different meanings in culture. It becomes the location of
everything that is uniquely ours, and therefore different from anything
that can be found in the world of the colonizer. As we become modern Indians,
and then go on to become citizens of an independent nation, we hold on to the
idea of “our culture” as setting us apart from others.

Here the culture question is an intimate part of the
formation of our modern identity, but culture in modernity tends to be
seen as something that remains outside of modernity [needs explanation]. This
mean that in discussions on/descriptions of what is ‘modern’, culture is made
to stand as that which is not-modern, that which is traditional and is outside
the processes of westernisation that then come to be seen as modern. Something
like the Internet is then seen as part of ‘modernity’, while Ayurveda comes to
be seen as inherently part of an ‘Indian’ culture. This curious relationship
between culture and modernity, a relationship that has its roots in the
colonial context, may give us some indication as to why women occupy the place
they do in discussions about culture.

This issue is not specific only to India. There
are many similarities between the Indian context and other societies across Asia.

4. The woman
question in Asia:

Kumari Jayawardena’s
classic work Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986) had
argued that in the non-West these two movements share an intimate relationship.
Parallelly, the ‘culture question’ also becomes a ‘national culture question’,
with significant implications for women. Although nationalist movements
fighting against the colonizer enable women’s political participation, they
also create for them a fixed position in the symbolism of national culture.
[Give eg. We can see examples of this in the production of the New Woman in Japan or Korea
or India].

A
criticism routinely faced by feminists across Asia
is that they are deracinated or alienated from ‘our culture’, that feminism
comes from the West and is therefore an alien set of ideas. Interestingly, this
is not a charge levelled against any of our other political frameworks (eg.
Marxism, liberalism) which may also be far from having a clearly identifiable
local or indigenous source. Why then does feminism come under fire for being alien?
Feminist demands are allegedly demands arising from ‘modernization’, which is
seen to erase ‘our’ culture and replace it with western values and ways of
life. This criticism is easily made, but it does not take into account how the
notion of culture itself has been put together in our context.

One of our starting
points would be to understand (a) how the creation of the national essence was
based on the assertion of cultural difference from the West (how ‘we’ are
different from ‘them’), and (b) how women were frequently represented as the
embodiment of that difference (that it is in women, their bodies and
lives, that this difference lives). When nationalists in the non-Western world
produce a relationship of conflict between modernity and culture, what is being
implied is that women are part of that which is cultural and therefore authentic.
They cannot be part of the modern. So when women behave in ways associated with
modernity (read assertive, individualistic, ambitious…) they are seen as
challenging their place in Indian culture and therefore undermining that
culture itself. These inter-related ideas have presented a serious problem for
feminists in India
who are trying to question the place ascribed to women. So it is through
feminist efforts that we gained insights into how a historically specific way
of thinking about Indian women came to be naturalised. Feminist historians have been able to show
that the formulation of notions of culture in India were premised on woman,

Read the following
quotation:

From Partha
Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question”:

[In struggling
against colonial domination, nationalists looked for a resolution to the
contradictions involved in being simultaneously attracted to and repelled by
Western ideas]

“…[T]his resolution
was built around a separation of the domain of culture into two spheres – the
material and the spiritual. It was in the material sphere that the claims of
western civilization were the most powerful. Science, technology, rational
forms of economic organisation, modern methods of statecraft, these had given
the European countries the strength to subjugate non-European peoples and to
impose their dominance over the whole world. To overcome this domination, the
colonized people must learn these superior techniques… But this could not mean
the imitation of the West in every aspect of life… What was necessary was to
cultivate the material techniques of modern western civilization while
retaining and strengthening the distinctive spiritual essence of the national
culture”.

[Chatterjee goes on
to argue that the material/spiritual distinction was condensed into a powerful
distinction between inner and outer, home and world, private and public. The
distinctions were mapped onto gendered social roles, as the new middle class
men went out to work and mingle with Europeans and women were entrusted with
the burden of maintaining the purity of the inner world. In reconciling
modernity with nationalism, a new patriarchy was assembled, with new roles for
women. In other words, in order to make the drive towards technology, science
and rationality acceptable, in order to make modernity acceptable to and in the
Indian context, a spiritual inner domain was imagined, and this was to be
occupied by women, who by doing this would uphold Indian culture as superior to
that in the West. The idea of the middle class woman took shape: cultural
refinement, formal education, appropriate spiritual forms of femininity.]

“The need to adjust
to the new conditions outside the home had forced upon men a whole series of
changes in their dress, food habits, religious observances and social
relations. Each of these capitulations now had to be compensated by an
assertion of spiritual purity on the part of women. They must not eat, drink or
smoke in the same way as men; they must continue the observance of religious
rituals which men were finding it difficult to carry out; they must maintain
the cohesiveness of family life and solidarity with the kin to which men could not
now devote much attention”.

Questions about the
reading:

Activity: Put together
photographs from family albums or from other sources that show women and men’s
dress from the 19th century to the present. Explain what the
similarities and differences between the pictures are.

As Chatterjee shows
in the quotation above, the assigning of new roles to women also had to do with
the formation of the new urban middle class in colonial times.

Read the following
quotation:

Sumanta Banerjee,
“Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal” from Recasting
Women [Sangari and Vaid 1989]:

“Englishmen, like
[Augustus] Willard, who came to Bengal in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, carried two burdens: the ‘white man’s
burden’ of educating the unenlightened natives, and the ‘man’s burden’ of
emancipating native women from what they considered to be a socio-cultural
milieu of utter ignorance and impurity. The latter burden came to be shared by
the English-educated Bengali bhadralok of the nineteenth century (sons of
absentee landlords, East India Company agents and traders who made fortunes in
the eighteenth century, various professionals and government servants) all of
whom, in spite of differences in economic and social status, were moving
towards the development of certain common standards of behaviour and cultural
norms….There were subtle differences among members of the nineteenth century
Bengali urban elite over the extent to which women should be educated and
allowed free movement in society. However, they all agreed on the need to
eradicate what they were trained to believe was the pernicious influence of
certain prevailing literary and cultural forms on Bengali women, particularly
on the women belonging to their own homes.
[Popular
culture – doggerel, poetry, songs, theatrical performances – had wide appeal
for a female audience, but because it was produced by those who were not part
of the bhadralok’s official culture, there were systematic attempts to get rid
of it]

Questions about the
reading:

[ABOUT CLASS
FORMATION IN RELATION TO WOMEN]

Activity: Observe women from
different social backgrounds in a public place like a market or a railway
station. Focus on how they speak, how they walk and sit, and how they are
perceived by others, especially men (from different classes).

Part of the colonial
contestation was carried out in the domain of law and governance. One of the
most significant debates related to the abolition of the practice of sati
[Explain term]. The debate shows vividly how the women’s question became the
ground for the discussion about Indian culture.

Read the following
quotation:

From Lata Mani’s
“Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India”:

“…[T]radition is
reconstituted under colonial rule and, in different ways, women and brahmanic
scripture become interlocking grounds for this rearticulation. Women become
emblematic of tradition, and the reworking of tradition is largely conducted
through debating the rights and status of women in society. Despite this
intimate connection between women and tradition, or perhaps because of it,
these debates are in some sense not primarily about women but about what
constitutes authentic cultural tradition.”

Questions
about the reading:

Activity:

Feminist writing on
more contemporary issues may not have directly addressed the culture question
as such, but it is possible to look at some of the 1990s discussions, say
around religious community, or around caste, as referring implicitly to the
culture question. (Possible Activity: List two or three debates or
controversies In the 90s and how the culture question enters the picture vis a
vis these). If religious identity and caste identity came to be seen as
non-modern in the political controversies of the 1990s, women were also
implicated in this naming process. Modern women, like upper caste men from the
dominant religion, in claiming their rights as women ended up claiming them against
women and men from less-privileged backgrounds.

Quotations from UCC
debate and from Tharu-Niranjana essay (The contemporary theory of gender) to
foreground the religion and caste question